The Great Newspaper Scandal - 1950

John Bird Remembers

OOKING at
the photo of the 1951 School production
of "The Rivals 1951" I came across
the figure of Beverley Tarlo. There he is, sitting in the front row,
face carefully posed in half profile, a picture of idealism and
ego. He was a contemporary of mine, and a something of a
character in a school, which at that time, seemed to be full of
characters.

Bev was about fourteen
when he joined LCGS. His paternal name was Halstead but his
mother had re-married Maurice Tarlo, a lawyer who, I understand,
worked at that time for the notorious ETU, a very left-wing
union. Unsurprisingly, in view of this background, Bev was an
orthodox Communist and a card carrying member of the Young
Communist League. He had drive and confidence and he relished,
even sought after, controversy. His special obsessions, apart
from politics, were Graptolites and Trilobites - primitive
fossils. He would talk about them endlessly, apparently with
great knowledge and authority. To those of us only marginally
interested in our studies, and rather more preoccupied with the
'talent' from the Girls Grammar School, such an intellectual
interest, so intensely pursued, struck us as a bit odd, even
though it gained for him a certain grudging respect.

Bev was really in his element when he had a cause to pursue.
One event that I specially remember concerned a young black man
who was due to be executed for rape in the USA who may well have
been framed by the local white community - as was and is their
way in the Deep South. The Daily Worker newspaper, the mouthpiece
for the Communist Party in this country at that time, took on his
cause, and Bev went round the school looking for signatures in
support. To a man, except I think, for Dick Field, and a few
others, we did what he asked. What is more, some members of staff
signed in support, and these included Donald Auld - the Head of
French, who should have known better.

Bev, never one to do things by half measures, duly sent the
signatures as a petition to the Daily Worker, on a sheet of paper
headed with the name of the school and, totally innocent of the
likely consequences, we waited for a response.

This takes me to the other personalities in this tale: NRJ
Bradshaw, the Headmaster, and Major Tufton-Beamish MP.

NRJB, aka 'the Old Man', was the classic Grammar School Head
of those days; an establishment figure, member of Rotary and one
who valued his contacts in the county set. He was in charge of a
school that was geared, above everything else, to nurture the few
to get into Oxbridge. The rest of us, although not exactly
ignored, could take second place in the scheme of things. This is
not to say that NRJB was an unsympathetic character. Anyone who
heard his moving peroration in Southover Parish Church on
Remembrance Day, could perceive a sensibility cut to the quick by
the loss of so many Old Boys in the Second World War. Indeed
NRJB, to my mind, comes out of this story as something of a hero.
He was a product of his time who despite his somewhat reactionary
views, retained a sound integrity.

If Bradshaw was a classic Grammar School Head then
Tufton-Beamish was a classic right-wing rural Tory MP. He was
profoundly anti-communist and had expressed his point of view
forcefully on a visit to the Sixth-Form Society at the school,
ironically enough, at about the same time as Bev's petition was
winging its way to the offices of the Daily Worker. Later, I
think, he was to write a book critical of Stalinism. No-one could
be in any doubt of T-B's political views.

Inevitably, Bev's, or rather our, petition hit the Daily
Worker under a headline such as " Grammar School Stands Firm
Against Impending Execution" spread lavishly across its front
page. News spread to the other Nationals, and reporters from the
Mirror and Express took to way-laying youngsters as they walked
to and from school to find out if we were all members of a
hard-line communist cell committed to the destruction of western
democracy and if we ate babies for lunch. The scandal grew and
grew. Questions were being asked about LCGS.

NRJB was furious. He uncompromisingly carpetted the Sixth
Form, whilst letting it be known off the record that he had told
those staff who had signed the petition that their jobs were very
much on the line. Tufton-Beamish, in his turn, was known to have
written to NRJB, threatening, among other things, never to visit
the school again unless the ringleaders were punished The
sensitive amongst us were duly dismayed and horrified. Not so
Beverley who, despite several difficult interviews with the Old
Man saw the whole thing as a victory of the left against the
forces of reaction, and seemed unperturbed, even stimulated by
the row.

Of course this provincial storm in a teacup soon came off the
front pages and was forgotten, but there is an interesting
epilogue to the story which may throw some light on NRJB's
character, and his true feelings about the affair. A little while
after the event he called the prefects into his study and was
about to address us when the phone rang and he was called away.
He was gone for a very long time; long enough for the inquisitive
amongst us to spot a letter laid out ostentatiously on the desk
written from the Head to Tufton-Beamish which in effect said that
" . . . of course . . . sympathised . . . stand against the
communist menace . . . young men . . . naive in the ways of the
world . . . idealists . . . best of humanitarian motives . . .
advice . . . assurances of future conduct . . . salutary lesson
learned . . . punishment enough . . . etc, etc". All of which, of
course, was quite true - a perfect gem of emollient
circumlocution.

Looking back, one suspects a deliberate leak by NRJB of the
contents of this letter to Tufton-Beamish for it would enable him
to reveal its contents to the 6th Form without embarrassing the
MP by making it public. What an exemplary lesson this must have
been for any embryonic civil servants or politicians among us
if it were really so.

A nice story - if it is true! But here a problem arises for I
am writng about an event that happened 50 years ago. I am
reminded of AP Hartley's comment that " The past is another
country. They do things differently there". Memory fades and
tends to be subverted by what one would like to have happened.
For the life of me I can't remember what occurred when Bradshaw
got back from his urgent errand. Did he read the letter to us -
in which case there was no leak and my interpretation of the
events is quite wrong - or was there some other business that had
caused him to call us together? Maybe someone else who was there
can remember?

I never met Bev after I left school, although I came across
his parents in the 1970's living near Tunbridge Wells, that
boiling cauldron of left-wing subversion, where Maurice Tarlo,
Bev's stepfather, was lecturing in law at the local College of
Further Education. By then he too had moved a little to the right
- he had joined the local Fabians!

What snippets of information that I did obtain suggest that
Bev, who had reverted to his natural father's surname, continued
to be a thorn in the flesh of the establishments where he worked.
He was at one time a Reader at Reading University, and an expert
on Dinosaurs, just as he was so learned about Trilobites and
Graptolites at school, and was a pillar of the Royal Geological
Society. He never attained the Professorship which perhaps he
deserved - no doubt because of his bloody-mindedness and a total
inability to suck up to the establishment. I once met a student
of Bev's in Penzance, who spoke warmly of this prematurely
white-haired maverick who stubbed out his fags in dishes made
from the vertebrae of Dinosaurs

I gather also that, true to character, Bev was involved in
some other major dramatic episodes. In one such event, in front
of a learned gathering, he and his wife, who had dressed up as
Dinosaurs, gave a graphic demonstration of how he thought these
reptiles mated. In another, he re-created, in modern terms, the
famous 19th century confrontation about Evolution, by taking
Thomas Huxley's part in a debate with the then Bishop of
Oxford.

From the odd newspaper report, here and there, I also noticed
signs that not only had Bev moved to the right, as many of us are
prone to do as we get older, but right off the page! He
contributed articles to the Salisbury Review, and was also
involved in a notorious battle with the Natural History Museum
about their use of Cladistics, a modern method devised to
classify living things, which he claimed, in the Times and
elsewhere to be a Marxist conspiracy! For the life of me, as a
biologist, I didn't understand what he was getting at, although I
know that he would have had a ready, and very convincing answer
to that question.

Unfortunately, however, Bev is beyond all the debate and
controversy that followed him throughout his life. Many years ago
he was travelling from Bath, his car packed with materials for
the annual British Association Conference when he hit a lorry
that was doing a U-turn on a dual carriageway and was killed. So
much achieved, but so much more to do!